International Mother Language Day Celebration at Hyderabad, February 21, 2012.

International Mother Language Day is an observance held annually on 21 February worldwide to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism. It was first announced by UNESCO on 17 November 1999.

This year, Andhra Pradesh State government, department of IT, in association with Silicon Andhra celebrated International Mother Language Day at Jublee Hall, Hyderabad. The State Government has taken a positive step in making Telugu as an official full member of the US-based Unicode Consortium, paving the way for standardised, user-friendly fonts and scripts for the language on computers.

Telugu is the first Indian language to join the Unicode consortium as a full permanent member.

In an interview given to The Hindu, the IT & Communications Minister for Andhra Pradesh, Ponnala Lakshmaiah said:

"There are 84 million people in Andhra Pradesh and another 110 million Telugu-speaking people outside India. Mobile penetration in Andhra Pradesh is very high, at 75 per cent, and it is time to modernise the language and make it as a mass communication tool." 

As part of the celebrations, myself, Veeven & Rahmanuddin hosted Mozilla Firefox booth(with permission ;)) to promote Firefox in Telugu. We put up a banner that reads 'Firefox in Telugu', printed in Telugu language and distributed some swag at the main venue!
 

The response at the booth has been great with meeting several Firefox fans, some already users of Firefox in Telugu! The celebration witnessed language lovers/ linguists, Students, Press/Media, State Government officials including Cheif Minister, Kiran Kumar Reddy. 

More photos from the event can be found at Mozilla India Flickr page.